Abstract
Objects are complicated things, and no less so when they are created by us. We layer created objects with additional emotional meaning. Understanding the complexity of this layering requires much more than tracing the narrative history of an object. This essay is about the objects that we make and appropriate. In particular, the essay suggests that objects need to be understood sensitively both in the context of global human history, and the ontological framing of the various moments of their creation, use, appropriation and reception. The essay folds around four contentions. Objects are central to the narration of social relations and emotional life. Objects, as carriers of meaning, move across different ontological orientations. Objects exist in multiple and ontologically different time frames, sometimes at the same time. And objects mediate our (human) relation to the larger social and natural world, even as they (and we) are part of that world.
1 Introduction
Objects mediate the way that we relate to the world. Some objects, from works of art and pieces of craft to tools and machines, are intended to evoke emotions, from happiness and aesthetic pleasure to awe and anguish. Other objects – such as the rocks at the bottom of the ocean – remain (for now) beyond creative intention or emotional appropriation. However, there is a certain category of object that seems unavoidably to keep coming back into the frame of human attention: created objects. These kinds of objects are material-cultural. They are born both of nature and social intervention. As we variously use these fabricated things, ignore them, appropriate them, cherish or fetishise them, they carry changing meanings that over time move in and out of focus. The renewing attention we afford them derives from their moment of creation (bridging nature and culture), their history (abstracting across time), and their current place in the world (condensing life-worlds and calling attention to human activity). In short, fabricated objects are complex entities with both social and natural beginnings, interwoven histories and intersecting life-worlds. This essay explores this complexity, focusing on the relation between objects, meanings and emotions. It maps how the meaning of objects changes over time.
We can begin to give more than a conventional meaning to the oft-stated claim that the emotional meaning of objects continually changes by situating those meanings, both in historical and ontological context. Certainly, objects sometimes accrue layers of significance over time, and sometimes that meaning starts anew with a current encounter. However, it is our argument that developing an adequate method for mapping these changes needs to go beyond the usual modern treatment of objects as if they were akin to stones rolling through time and gathering moss. Many writers have developed genealogies of particular objects, often treating the process of mapping the accumulation of layers of meaning as analogous to writing a biography.1 Objects are thus said to gather life stories. Such a method begins with the point of production and tracks the object over time, asking how different people felt about this object at different times. However, objects are not only polytemporal (existing across different time periods); they are also polychromatic, to use Jonathan Gil Harris’s distinction (meaning that time can be seen as a palimpsest of multiple experiences of temporality).2 However, when Harris elaborates on polychromatic time, he turns to the idea of time ‘out of joint’ – that is, the meaning of an object as ‘untimely’ or effected as the past-in-the-present. This is for us a limited idea of polychromatic difference. As much as Harris writes about the irruptions of the past upon the present, he does not name the different ontologies of time (discussed in a moment) or show how, in the present, different ontologies of time might be creatively held as equally valid and consequential even while they are in tension. All of the examples we will narrate later in the essay speak to this layering.
We do not want to completely discard the biographical, actor-network theory or palimpsestic approaches to objects altogether, but rather to reframe them, add to them and subtract from them. We suggest that understanding how emotions are variously (that is, differently at different times) attached to objects needs to be understood with more systematic attention to questions of creative and disjuncture tension. We argue in particular that such a method needs to recognise the ontologically different ways in which those emotions are lived. In these terms, by working with four contentions, this essay seeks to move beyond the ontologically flat versions of object narration. Expressed directly, the meaning-as-moss mode, the palimpsest mode or even treating meaning as formed through assemblages or open networks of rhizomic connections cannot, we suggest, adequately handle questions of ontological difference.
Objects are central to human narration of social relations and emotional life. Across human history, objects have been used to narrate the meaning of our lives. Objects carry our emotions in all domains of social life, including the economic. However, this does not mean that, even with deep research, we can always understand the emotional meaning that an object had for someone else in a different setting. Understanding such emotional resonances requires access to how others narrate their feelings about an object.3 Here, written and otherwise recorded narration is the most important historical source of understanding. However, even then, when stretched across time, similarly named emotions do not necessarily mean the same thing.4
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Objects, as carriers of meaning, move across different ontological formations. These formations are defined as patterned, interrelational and constitutive ‘ways of being’, understood in terms of ontological categories such as time, space and embodiment. The concept of ontological formations is a more abstract way of describing what have been called, by many theorists, social formations. While social formations are defined in terms of conjunctures of modes of practice, ontological formations are defined in terms of the existential framing of those patterns of practice by modes of being.5
We do not treat ontological formations as ideal types, but neither are they treated as standalone formations, at least not in the period after customary societies lost their dominant place in the world. They are formations-in-dominance, coexistent and cotemporal. The names we give these formations – the customary, the traditional, the modern and the postmodern – are old conventional names used in various ways that may seem uncomfortable or awkward. However, rather than inventing neologisms, our approach works with these given names and seeks to redefine them in terms of their ontological bases. Moreover, rather than defining a formation in temporal distinction to other formations, using a term such as ‘premodern’ to designate all that has come before the modern, formations are defined both comparatively and for themselves. All of this means that they cannot be treated as epochs or stages except as provisional designations of a dominant formation. In order to distinguish between different formations, we need to introduce the notion of valences – different orientations or ways in which different categories of being such as time, space and embodiment are lived. This point then allows us to define each of these formations in relationship to each other, and to determine the dominant ways of producing, using, and understanding objects.6
The customary is defined by the way that analogical, genealogical and mythological valences come to constitute different social practices in relation to basic categories of existence: time, space, embodiment and so on. These three defining valences have been chosen because they give a minimal sense of the complexity of customary, including tribal life and Indigenous or First Nations communities. The easiest way of explaining these valences is with an example. With the dominance of the customary as an ontological formation, the category of time, for example, is bound (genealogically) to embodied generational successions and (analogically) to seasonal and other ‘natural’ changes. It is elaborated through the abiding stories (mythologies) told about the meaning of these relations. In this form, time is not linear, a characteristic of modern time, but nor is it circular, as many commentators have metaphorically claimed (circularity is a metaphor more relevant to some traditional cosmologies such as those of Hinduism or Tantric Buddhism). The same can be said for other existential categories such as space and embodiment.
The traditional is defined by the way in which those ‘prior’ valences are reconstituted by cosmological and metaphorical reframing. With an orientation towards the cosmological, foundational relations were and are abstracted in relation to a something else, both immanent and beyond (with the emphasis on the beyond): God, Nature, Form, Being. Multiple myths tend to be drawn together as interconnected cosmologies. With an orientation towards the metaphorical, foundational relations were and are abstracted in related to something enclosing and beyond (with the emphasis on the enclosing): the City of ‘Man’, the body politic, the civitas, the res publica Christiana.
The modern is defined by the way in which ‘prior’ valences of social life are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices and meanings – a reflexive, restless drive to construct and remake the world, nature and ourselves. The postmodern involves relativising these ‘prior’ orientations. Here, qualitative changes include the intensification of processes of mediation and abstraction and an unsettling of material, natural, and embodied life through technological intervention into foundation processes. None of these definitions has normative presumptions.
Objects as social things exist in multiple time frames, sometimes at the same time. Objects do not have a single linear life history, however complex that history may be in its writing. In the simplest sense of that contention, the same object at different times can have different meanings. Less obviously, an object at a single point in time can be framed by ontologically different temporalities. This can be the case even within the purview of a single observer. For example, for a Rapa Nui person from Easter Island (who might now be living in Chile because their forebears were forcibly removed from their homeland), the Moai statue called Hoa Hakananai’a (‘Stolen Friend’ or ‘Hidden Friend’) exists in modern calendrical time as itself a contemporaneously displaced object, ‘collected’ in 1868 and transported to an alien land whose queen donated it to the British Museum.7 In this sense, Hoa Hakananai’a ‘lives’ objectively and metaphorically. However, Hoa Hakananai’a also exists in traditional cosmological and customary mythological times. It is the face of a dead ancestor who lives outside a modern temporal frame. That is, in the cultural traditions of the Rapa Nui, the object lives literally, now.
Objects mediate our (human) relation to the larger social and natural world, even as they are part of that world. As we will argue, mediation is itself an ontologically variable process. The ontological formation that frames the created meaning of the baked clay tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh (discussed below) is fundamentally different for the modern/postmodern visitor to the British Museum, where a fragment of Tablet V is now housed, and the cosmologically framed person living in the seventh century BCE as they listened to a priest read or relive the prose saga. In the twenty-first century, in a world in which social relations, including our relations to nature, have become increasingly stretched, fractured and abstracted, the nature of this mediation has become both increasingly complicated and layered. This, as we will discuss, can lead to distorted understandings as much as it provides powerful interpretative perspectives.
As a way of further testing and complicating the emotional resonance of objects, this essay engages in a thought experiment about a project still in development. Two questions narrow this proposed exercise. First, what would it mean to focus on human-created objects that have been collected by history and technical museums? These are special kinds of objects. For an object to be housed in an institution that codifies and orders the history of material culture, that object is considered to express something about the human condition. Whatever the collecting policy of the museum, that phrase, ‘something about the human condition’, is intended to encompass the myriad of prosaic and carefully developed collecting rationales. Placing an object in a museum collection perforce lifts that object into human attention. For the purpose of this essay, we have selected objects mostly from the British Museum and the Deutsches Technikmuseum, where our project is centred. Here we are following (very critically) in the footsteps of a new genre of writing which picks out 100 objects and uses those objects to say something about a theme as we think we know it.8 For our 100 chosen objects, our project uses the Circles of Emotion taxonomy (discussed below) and will ask respondents to record the intensity and range of their emotional responses on a set matrix of named emotions. Because this taxonomy has been mapped against historically prior taxonomies, it will allow us to compare these contemporary responses to prior written responses to the same objects. It should be underlined, however, that because the project has not yet moved beyond the analytical stage, the essay can describe only the method, not the outcomes of the research. This is a work in progress that cannot yet draw direction conclusions from its research about rethinking the field of emotions. It is speculative.
Second, we ask, ‘What would it mean to focus on human-created objects in terms of the way in which they express human impact on the planet?’ ‘Our’ time has been named ‘the Anthropocene’: a period in which we as humans have effected discernible geological repercussions across the planet. This is a momentous claim. Naming the realisation that we are making material and environmental changes to the planet means that objects take on an additional post facto layer of meaning. In addition to their prior biographies, they now can be treated as signifiers of the once emerging and now galloping impact of human beings on the planet. This new self-consciousness of living on planet Earth during a time of crisis has also meant that the way in which we now appropriate objects (for example, their housing, affording of provenance, and reception) is changing from the way in which they would have been understood at the time they were originally collected.
Despite an initial excited flourish of public interest about the concept, the notion of ‘the Anthropocene’ continues to perplex. The naming has tended to remain mired in separate spheres of engagement. In the academic world, there is a split between the apparently value-neutral scientific contestation over what constitutes geological impact, and passionate social science arguments over what caused the impact, when the period began and even what the period should be called. In the public realm of the media and internet, responses range from indifference or hear-no-evil deferral of what this naming means to emotional proclamations that the naming signifies that we have entered the ‘End Times’ and that human impact has to be radically curtailed. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene has given rise to a range of emotions from casual indifference and perplexed detachment to intense captivation and deep trepidation.
Taking these questions and contentions as its orienting guide, our project seeks to understand how different people feel about significant objects. The objects under consideration range from the prehistoric human remains of the first known victims of organised violence, buried in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery (British Museum), and a canister for sperm whale oil from about 1900 (Deutsches Technikmuseum), the product of a species that still today remains in danger of extinction, to a Barbie Doll ‘Shop with Me’ cash register. We want to track the changing nature of objects from the first homo sapiens to the contemporary period. In short, our project seeks to give material meaning to relationships between humans and the material-natural world by focusing on created objects that can be said to represent long and changing human impact on our planet.
2 Mapping Emotions
The approach used for the present project, Circles of Emotion, is intended to facilitate an understanding of complexity without being overwhelmed by the myriad possible ways of naming emotional responses.9 A circle of named emotions is figuratively organised for clarity and simplicity, and used for respondents to identify the emotions that they feel about the objects. A respondent can attribute as many emotions, or as few, and with different intensities, to a particular object.
Overall, having a guiding taxonomy of emotions has certain benefits. First, it escapes the issues of oversimplifying or setting up singular binaries, a product of using two opposing categories or even a single-level two-by-two matrix of categories without developing it further. There has been a long debate in the psychology of emotions since the 1970s concerning ‘bipolar’ terms – for example, defining organising clusters such as positive versus negative.10 By moving against this tendency, we are not absolutely contesting the contemporary popular view that affective space is lived as if it is organised in binary terms.11 Rather, we are arguing that, given the contemporary tendency towards popular use of opposites – sad versus happy, for example – we needed a method where the contingent possibility of emotional opposites is recognised without it being formalised as part of the given structure.
Second, we did not want to presume the singularity of emotions – at least as conventionally understood. Setting up a circle of crosscutting but not opposite emotions avoids the presumption that a person cannot feel emotions on both sides of an organising taxonomy at the same time. It is clearly possible to feel happy and sad simultaneously.12 The affective world, as opposed to the world of neurobiology, is full of terms for composite conflicting emotions – bitter-sweet, tears of joy. These are feelings that need not necessarily be explained away as proxy names for processes of restoring emotional equilibrium.
Circles of Emotions: The taxonomy used in the Objects of the Anthropocene Project
Citation: Emotions: History, Culture, Society 7, 1 (2023) ; 10.1163/2208522x-02010190
Third, we sought an approach that could handle the complexity of emotional events in which felt emotions immediately faded off into ‘nothing’ or into cognate feelings, or transmogrified into ‘opposing’ emotions or bounced off other emotions sometimes felt simultaneously. Spinoza called it the ‘vacillation of the mind’,13 but even this does not get at the way in which a single emotion contains its own ambivalences.
Fourth, we sought a comprehensive taxonomy in which potentially every concept of emotion in the English language (or other languages) could be mapped, keeping in mind that with changes in language any translation has to be interpretive and contextualised, not automatic. In the taxonomy that we finally arrived at each subdomain-level concept of emotion was chosen as standing in for a cluster of cognate emotions. For example, the emotion of feeling surprised was used to name the cluster of emotions that includes those of feeling awed, amazed, astonished, startled, stunned, stupefied, wonder and many more. This method sits in the background of the next stage of our discussion. We will use this taxonomy in the background of what follows.
3 Objects Exist in Multiple Time Frames and Different Ontological Orientations
The body of the remaining discussion is organised around four major phases in world history. Here the term ‘phase’ still denotes a loose periodisation, but it takes the usual heavy demarcated emphasis off concepts such as ‘stage’, ‘period’ or ‘epoch’. The concept of ‘phase’ comes from the Late Latin phasis, an ‘appearance’ and Greek phainein ‘to shine’. In our engaged method, this open periodisation is crosscut by different ways of being: the customary, traditional, modern and postmodern, all of which coexist in the present. The more usual designation is also fourfold: hunting and gathering, agricultural, industrial and post-industrial. However, these categories focus too narrowly on economic practices to define ‘ways of being’ rather than expressing the full range of human activity – one of our many reasons for a different set of categories. In summary, we treat these phases both contingently and conditionally. That is, it is important neither to downplay the consequences of a dominant way of life nor to ignore that it tends to coexist with other ways of life, even as it dominates them. In any given phase, dominant ontological formations are thus understood as always in tension with other enduring, emergent and residual ways of relating to others, a schema adapted from Raymond Williams.14 In the vignettes that follow we can only hint at the emotional biographies of the objects we describe, but this last part of the essay is intended to begin the process of such mapping.
3.1 Phase 1. The Great Divergence
This is a phase which begins approximately 125,000 years ago when humanity (homo sapiens) first spread across the globe from Africa.15 The dominant way of life that developed during this time was customary – bands and then tribes of grounded communities. The centre of the phase is symbolically marked by the moment around 12,000 years ago when bands of hunters and gatherers reached the southern region of South America. This ‘event’ signalled the end of the long process of settling all continents (except, that is, for Antarctica, which never hosted an Indigenous population). Even during this time, objects had more than use-value.
3.1.1 The Olduvai Hand-axe
While not strictly inside the time of the Great Divergence, one of the British Museum’s oldest objects can stand in as an ambiguous pointer to this first phase. The Olduvai hand-axe turns out to be a surprisingly complicated object. Its after-life as an historical, collected and appropriated object complicates everything.16 Significantly, the object is included in Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects, a collection that was intended to ‘range in date from the beginning of human history around two million years ago and come right up to the present day’.17 MacGregor writes with unabashed awe and wonder about the ‘tear-shaped’ object (his emotions range across the constellations of surprise and excitement in the Circles matrix – see Figure 1). He attributes the object’s creation to the parallel possibilities of ‘our ancestors’ learning to speak and cooperating with each other in the act of creation.
To the contemporary person – the museum-goer, the commentator – this stone does tend to excite wonder. The exquisitely sharpened, symmetrical object is made from phonolite, an uncommon rock that formed during the cooling of magma on the earth’s surface. Phonolite is very difficult to work with, requiring great precision with other stone tools in order to sharpen. This difficulty is increased with the technique of chipping off flakes from both surfaces, thus creating a sharper blade that would last longer than the much older technique of single-side sharpening. It proved a tremendously powerful technique and such hand-axes were used across vast distances and across remarkable lengths of time.
This particular hand-axe was unearthed in 1934 from Olduvai Gorge, a steep-sided ravine in the great Rift Valley of East Africa in what is now called Tanzania. This region suffered centuries of plunder at the hands of Portuguese, Arab slave traders, German and then British colonial empires. The colony went from the Germans to the British during the First World War, and it was in this period of British occupation that Louis Leakey, the famous Kenya-born British palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist, continued the work of his German predecessors in archaeological digs in Olduvai Gorge.18 Leakey was eager to prove his thesis on human evolution to scholars back in London, and set up camp in the gorge along with his first wife Frida, whom he put to work digging in addition to taking care of their new-born daughter. The spoils of this endeavour were donated to the British Museum. From this history, narrating how the axe was found, we could trace many different emotional fields in our taxonomy (Figure 1), from the ambition of a scientist and sadness of a family drama that would soon culminate in a divorce, to the pride in rapacious imperial extensions and global plundering. These are colonial relationships that now afflict most museum collections, with continuing but very different emotional consequences concerning their collecting policies.
For all of this richness, however, stone tools carry too much weight in the story of becoming human. They occupy an overly prominent place in many modern explanations of the origins and creative genius of human being as we seek to understand how ‘we’ reconstructed our place in the world. For example, they lead to an economic-centred view of history that sets up neat periods from a Stone Age to a Bronze Age and Iron Age, all the way through to the ages of Steam and Silicon. Such reductive one-dimensional accounts are in part understandable, given that stone tools as objects endure across time whereas the stories, songs, dance, paintings, rituals and dreams – all that was erotic and sensual – were not at this phase in time carved into stone or written about.19
Considered with restraint, such enduring objects do allow nevertheless for some sensitive attribution and contextual framing. We know from its symmetrical design and the care of its creation that the axe was created according to aesthetic principles and is thus not only about utility. It was fundamentally bound up with meaning-making and thus with the broader culture of the people who produced it. But without significantly more evidence, we cannot say much more about how this meaning-making would have involved layers of culture, from mythic meanings and spiritual significance through to, possibly, group identity and organisation of power. We can attribute practices of care, but not feelings of care. Given the vast gulf of time and limited material evidence, we cannot know much about the beings who created this axe, the content of their grounded ontology or their possible social structure. What is immediately apparent to a contemporary viewer is that the axe is an object of sublime beauty, and this awe blinds us to many things, including the proper object of our awe.
The most ‘obvious’ thing is that we are blinded to is our own fragile, limited history of around 200,000 years on this planet. The Olduvai hand-axe was not fabricated by us – homo sapiens. It has been known for some time from microscopic analysis that its creator likely belonged to the extinct species of meaning-make ape called homo habilis. It was one of six or more species of hominins that lived at this time, all of which are now extinct.20 It was not one of our ancestors. Such a point ruins the conventional proud story of ‘us’ (the emotion of pride in the Circles taxonomy is appropriately linked to feeling defiant, dignified, exulted, honoured, jubilant, superior and triumphant – a mixed constellation of emotions).
The hand-axe was created by a different species from us in the deep time of the unfathomable past, about 1.5 million years ago – a time-span 300 times longer than the gap between the present and the creation of the Great Pyramid. That would be over 60,000 generations if they were our ancestors. It is that which should evoke awe, not appropriating their creativity. Yes, homo habilis was part of the genus homo, the naming itself part of a classificatory scheme made by us, but their relationship to us as homo sapiens remains conjectural. The emotional surprise of contemplating this deep time can reveal our current existence as but a moment in the existence of life on earth – albeit a simultaneously glorious and ruinous planet-changing moment.
Mediated by the abstracting techniques of radiocarbon dating, we are a long way from the earth-grounded, possibly tree-sleeping, creators of the Olduvai hand-axe. And yet, despite the alienating depths of time, the axe also has a tangible intimacy to it. We can imagine our own hands gripping the extraordinary blade that ‘they’ made. While it is not an object that we are allowed to grasp physically – for museum glass prevents this – through the meaning-making abstraction of the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’, we can begin to generate complex and contradictory emotional responses in which the modern romancing of human origins drops away. In other words, even if we did not make the hand-axe, it can tell us much about the human condition now that we want to appropriate it. It can provide some much-needed reflection on the emotional hubris of the present modern/postmodern condition and our own continuing Anthropocentric presumptions.
3.2 Phase 2. The Great Universalising
Gradually and unevenly, across the period from around 4,000 BCE, settled tribes, chiefdoms and, later, states emerged based on agricultural production, patrimonial organisation, war-making capacities and cosmological enquiry. In some cases, once the ontological foundations were laid, traditional states emerged relatively quickly. Illustrative of this process, one massive object, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was created only 150 years after the very first, much smaller step-style pyramid. That such grand objects could be produced signals an intense transformation of lived social practice, the emergence of an entirely new ontological formation: the traditional. In certain places, in particular alluvial regions such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, continuing hunter-gatherer groups (ontologically customary-analogical) were displaced by centralised and stratified patriarchal social structures headed by chiefs, priests and divine kings (ontologically cosmological). This is not to suggest the usual ‘ascent of man’ story, with domesticating agriculture and sedentarism inevitably giving rise to civilising polities. These new agricultural settlements were difficult places to live. Emerging polities had to domesticate their denizens – people, animals, plants and objects alike – and frame them cosmologically.21 Nevertheless, for the first time in human history, agricultural societies were able to support social classes whose members did not participate in food production. Some of these people became specialised producers of different kinds of objects from pyramids to clay tablets. Continuing our narrative, one such clay tablet, Tablet V of The Epic of Gilgamesh (housed in the British Museum) provides a complex metaphorical illustration of this phase.22
3.2.1 Tablet V of The Epic of Gilgamesh
Gripped with terrifying dreams of falling mountains, furious, spewing tempests, lightning and fire-breathing thunderbirds, Gilgamesh awoke in a panic and reconsidered his quest. Both mythological and cosmological nature-culture (crossing ontological formations) were conspiring to warn of potential chaos. Nevertheless, the warrior-king steeled himself and pressed onwards to confront Humbaba, an ancient giant and the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest. The giant fell in battle, and soon the holy forest was also felled. The Forest Guardian cursed Gilgamesh just before Humbaba and his seven sons were executed by the warrior-king, thus making Gilgamesh’s victory a doomed one.23
Gilgamesh, ‘He Who Saw the Deep’, is an important symbolic figure for tracing the history of the Anthropocene. His violent adventures can be seen as an ancient prelude to the expansions, violence and unsustainability of today’s world. They also bear a lesson for today’s world of reconstituted nature, economic expansion and collapsing ecologies. Perhaps we could interpret ‘the Deep’ that Gilgamesh saw into as the consequences of an early emerging self-consciousness and feelings of apprehensiveness concerning human impact upon the planet.
Frequently cited as the earliest known work of world literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient poem from Mesopotamia. This epic saga was composed in reference to the exploits of who was likely a historical king of the Sumerian city-state Uruk who lived sometime between around 2,800 and 2,500 BCE. For thousands of years after the cuneiform tablets were made, very little was known about Gilgamesh, save a few elements surviving from Roman historians. This was until the tablets were excavated in 1853 by an archaeological dig in the ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal, not far from the contemporary city of Mosul. The tablets were transported to the British Museum and translated in the 1870s, leading to passionate controversies, in part because the narrative pre-empts stories in the Hebrew and Christian Bible, in particular the story of the Great Flood, with the Old Babylonian version being authored over a thousand years before the Torah. It was only after the Second World War that The Epic of Gilgamesh began to become known outside archaeological and theological circles. It was picked up by existentialist novelists writing about the horrors of aerial bombing campaigns, before going on to inspire many alternative readings of it – from feminists and queer theorists to ecological thinkers.24
Much of the narrative of The Epic of Gilgamesh pivots on a confrontation between humanity and the forces of nature, rooted in the history of the region. The text was composed in the empire of Sumer, the earliest known civilisation in Mesopotamia in what is today known as Iraq. The empire was centred in the valleys between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, pivoting on a number of city-states, such as Uruk. These cities were fed by the results of an agricultural revolution that unfolded around them, with huge amounts of food being produced through an intricate system of irrigation that redirected the waters of the rivers. From these ecological foundations, Sumer had all the features that are now associated with a ‘civilisation’: monumental objects (in the form of vast ziggurats), high population density, small created artefacts of great beauty, huge armies and powerful war industries, and a centralised state apparatus led by a bureaucracy (powered by priests).25
In addition to agriculture, Sumer was heavily dependent on a supply of wood, essential for their architecture, ship-building industries, and the firing needed to make bronze and pottery. Once all nearby trees were felled, the Sumerians needed to send warriors further afield in order to make up for the dwindling resources demanded to continue their growth. Like Gilgamesh, Sumerian warriors would have marched up to into the mountainous regions to fell forests. The traditional warriors were confronted by customary tribes who, understandably, did not want their forests and lifeways destroyed. So, this resource-raiding – like millennia of resource-raiding to follow – progressed with bloody violence. Gilgamesh’s execution of Humbaba, the Forest Guardian, can thus be understood in the context of imperial expansion, driven onwards by an empire that was overstepping its ecological limits.
Humbaba’s curse is grounded in ecological limits.26 As the Sumerians razed the sacred forests in the mountains, they unknowingly intensified the processes of erosion, allowing significantly more mud to flow into the rivers. Salted earth and silted rivers choked the empire, contributing to the collapse of the civilisation. As this ecological collapse pulled Sumer apart, so it transformed the landscape for millennia to come, with the deserts that cover much of contemporary Iraq standing as an Anthropocenic legacy of the ecological folly of this long-gone civilisation.
The ancient text of Gilgamesh survives to the present in part because it was transcribed so many times by scribes learning the art of writing in cuneiform, one of the oldest known scripts. The sheer number of copies, along with its fired-clay medium, ensure its continuing existence. Writing, and the powerful processes of abstraction it gives rise to, were central to the Great Universalising. This was exemplified by the traditional religions, especially Christianity, Buddhism and then, later, Islam. The holy books that were central to these religions were produced through transcription, with scribes copying out the entire books by hand. A bridge between the Great Universalising and the next phase, the Great Convergence, the globalising of human interconnectedness, can be found in the medieval period through following the way written texts were reproduced – from script to print.
3.2.2 Jikji
The second khan-emperor Ögedei surveyed his immense and rapidly expanding world-historic empire, and in 1231 he ordered the conquest of the Korean peninsula. Staunch resistance made this very difficult, with almost twenty years and nine invasions required before Korea, then controlled by the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), capitulated and became a vassal state for three generations. During this turbulent time of Mongol invasions – and associated temple burning and plundering of sacred objects – the Goryeo rulers went to great lengths to protect their most valuable treasure, their distinct school of Zen Buddhist teachings. The Goryeo dynasty commissioned a civil servant, Choe Yun-ui, to preserve an important fifty-volume Buddhist text. Drawing upon older Korean and Chinese precedents, Choe Yun-ui devised a method for casting metal characters that could be arranged in a frame and pressed by hand to paper, thus creating the world’s first movable-type printings. By 1250, this work was complete. Significantly, metal was directed to the creation of movable type rather than weapons manufacturing, a striking fact in the face of the Mongol ‘hordes’.27
Just as with the Olduvai hand-axe, this object positively unsettles conventional pride in ‘our’ creative origins, this time the Eurocentric view that the first ‘important’ printed text was the Gutenberg Bible. That adjective ‘important’ is all too often used to excuse bad scholarship in the biography of objects. Important for whom? It would be another century before Johannes Gutenberg employed similar techniques at the other end of the Eurasian landmass to print the Bible. The major technical difference was Gutenberg’s use of pressing plates mechanically lowered over the paper rather than hand-pressing. In the Korean case, Choe Yun-ui’s work was not devised for spreading religion, but rather for preserving it, and at that it proved a resounding success. Korea’s Buddhist canon remained largely intact, indeed becoming more standardised and accessible for those seeking the dharma.28 The oldest surviving book to have been printed in this manner is Jikji (1377), a collection of Buddhist priests’ teachings. The sole surviving Jikji volume was taken to Europe in the late nineteenth century to be showcased at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and remains as part of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s collection.29 This world-historical text has rough French handwriting scribbled on the front cover and stickers showing its library catalogue number. Despite this limited material record, Korea’s invention of movable type is now memorialised in two museums, Cheongju Early Print Museum in South Korea and Koryo Museum in Kaesong in North Korea.
3.3 Phase 3. The Great Convergence
This was the time during which the world globally converged in spatial terms and modern ways of life came to dominate the planet. We date this from the ‘long sixteenth century’ (c.1450–1640) with the emergence of capitalism and the so-called ‘Age of Discovery’, marked by first known European circumnavigation of the globe.30 The term ‘modernity’ has become associated with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment project of developing objective science, generalising procedural frameworks of justice and law, and projecting rational modes of thought and social organisation over the perceived irrationalities of myth and cosmology. Shifting the emphasis, we focus on the way in which relations of constructivism came to overlay traditional valences of cosmology and metaphor, drawing upon them while remaking them. This allows us to acknowledge the existence of multiple expressions of modern ‘ways of being’ that developed in various parts of the world, both independently and in resistance to European modernity. While Europe was undoubtedly a key player in the process of modernisation, including globalising modernity itself, it was certainly not the only locus of the newly abstract social formation. Rather it emerged as a thoroughly global process.31 To exemplify this phase of human history, we have chosen a print from 1867 by a woman, based on a painting by a man in 1768, depicting an object that become central to experimenting on nature.
3.3.1 ‘A Philosopher Shewing an Experiment on the Air Pump’
What looks like a cockatiel writhes in panic as asphyxiation takes hold. It is a mystery how what appears to be an Australian bird could have been brought halfway around the world, only to end up in an English vacuum chamber and subjected to scientific suffocation. The mystery deepens, considering that the painting was completed in 1768, notably before the British settler-colonial invasion of Australia. It joins with other strangely anachronistic representations in art that suggest the possibility of very long trade routes bringing these long-lived birds great distances.32 However the cockatiel’s image managed to get there, the sacrificial bird is at once the centre-piece and yet, somehow, incidental to the painting by Joseph Wright of Derby.33 The English painter is known for his ‘glorious’ portraits of the industrial and scientific revolutions, effectively reworking the older artistic tradition developed in the Great Universalising phase and applying its depictions of religious awe and wonder to the emergent scientific age of the Great Convergence. Wright does not achieve this via a neat reconciliation of opposites, as is often claimed through religion-versus-science reductionism. Rather, elements of the previously dominant cosmological orientation remain, drawn into and remade by the more abstracted ontologies of capitalist modernity. Valentine Green, a nineteenth-century print-maker, renders the scene in exactly the same way. Resonances of temples, altars, acolytes and ritual sacrifices are all there, but now in pursuit of Enlightenment in its secular, rationalistic form. Much later, a journalist writes that science is a ‘marvellous and terrifying sight in this painting of a cruel experiment’, framing it as ‘a potent drama of light and darkness’.34 Such emotionally charged observations fall back to easy dichotomies. Rather, the Circles of Emotion method advanced here seeks to better navigate the actually existing complexity of understanding both emotions and historical formations.
This patriarchal image shows a scene of technological worship with a group gathered around the colonial sacrifice of a living being inside controlled nature. The emotional reactions of the ten people present are striking, their faces lit by a large glass of luminescent white liquid, with a submerged, grotesque, dark organic form – possibly a lung. This unnatural lighting renders the room in chiaroscuro, adding to the mythic effect of the full moon outside. Most of the men stare at the bird with various shades of scientific curiosity and detached contemplation, one of them even timing the event with a pocket watch ticking away in instrumental seconds. The women are depicted as fragile beings, either hiding their faces, requiring consoling or having to experience the spectacle vicariously through the face of the ‘stronger sex’.35 The scientist-patriarch at the centre of the image is firmly in control of the situation, his hand resting calmly on the stopcock through which air could return to the jar, reviving the hapless bird. Strikingly, the scientist stares directly out of the painting, challenging ‘us’ to respond to the experiment. This shows an apparently impassive self-consciousness that is absence from work from less abstracted times.
Wright’s painting was based on an experiment that occurred about one hundred years earlier, when the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691) commissioned a vacuum pump, what he called a ‘pneumatic engine’, to use for investigating nature. Fittingly, given our argument about the intersection of forms, Boyle was a pioneering figure of the modern experimental scientific method, as well as being a traditional alchemist and a pious Anglican. Connected to our emphasis on the importance of imperialism to this phase, he was also a director of the rapacious East India Company. Boyle thought more deeply about the cruelty he inflicted on his animal subjects than upon the colonial subjects of his company, understanding himself as an instrument of God, with his faith being inseparable from his scientific discoveries, with these located within a Christian typological system all headed towards the apocalypse.36
We can interpret this image as pointing to critical aspects of the Anthropocene. Through this experiment, Boyle sought to create conditions to control nature. With a hermetically sealed vessel he could dispassionately observe the lethal effects of rarefied air on living beings. Breaking from the traditional knowledge of horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum) attributed to Aristotle, Boyle used technology to create a hole in the atmosphere, a deadly void into which an animal was placed. Transforming the atmosphere is one of the most central aspects of the human-wrought transformations of the planet since Wright’s colleague, James Watt, fired up his steam engine to pump water from coal mines. To create those pistons at the core of steam-tech required an understanding of vacuums. This was the ground zero of the seemingly exponential rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
3.4 Phase 4. The Great Unsettling
The dramatic acceleration of global impact that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century represents yet another quantum leap in the history of human impact upon the planet.37 It is appropriate to call this latest period ‘the Great Unsettling’ because it is the period in which humans began to unsettle the nature of nature. This kind of impact went beyond the physical-mechanical impact of ploughing the earth and extracting resources. What came to public consciousness with the first splitting of the atom – what we are arguing involved the reconstitution of the nature of nature – has now, in a globalising process, extended to everything from nanotechnology, bioengineering, stem-cell therapy and DNA manipulation to geoengineering and terraforming. Some technical discussions of the Anthropocene use the sudden appearance of a layer of radioactive particles from nuclear explosions as the distinguishing marker of the new geological era. It is the period in which the rapid development of abstracted and disembodied connectivity came to relativise – to unsettle – relations between people, machines, regimes, objects and nature.
Today, the Great Unsettling stretches into every aspect of social life. It has emerged into contention at different speeds and with different temporal markers across all domains of social life. The Great Unsettling relates to the emergence of the postmodern, because the current period is characterised by the emerging dominance of processes and events that relativise meaning and practice. At one level, these processes reconstitute the ways in which time and space are lived. But since they do not change everything, they also generate deep contradictions that further unsettle social life. Choosing objects from museums to illustrate the contradictions of this phase takes us to two final objects: the first is a technical device in the Deutsches Technikmuseum; the second an artistic assemblage in the British Museum.
3.4.1 Cray-2 Supercomputer
Inventory number 1/2000/0946 000 in the German Museum of Technology catalogues the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1988, the year in which it was superseded. When it was released in 1985, the Cray-2 was the fastest computing machine on the planet. It was used for nuclear research, weather forecasting, climate simulation, fluid dynamics and to simulate car crashes, allowing Ford and General Motors to test the strength of car bodies prior to production.38 When delivered to the United States government it cost US$17 million and was the leading machine on the supercomputer market at that time. It was capable of performing almost 1.9 billion floating point operations per second, with the unit of measure – gigaFLOPS – suggesting something of the arcane and, to most people, deeply alien way in which these machines operate. At this speed, it could process in one hour what the 1948 ENIAC computer would take twenty-seven years could do (though it is now beaten by an iPhone 13 on almost all metrics). The Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, an institution funded by the US Department of Energy and charged with nuclear safety and security, had two Cray-2s. The circuits of these computer-machines heated up significantly from the 95 KW used to power them, and so, to prevent meltdown, the device was cooled by tubes filled with perfluorinated polyether, a substance that breaks down to form perfluoroisobutylene, an extremely toxic gas that is considered a concern to the Chemical Weapons Convention. While the Cray-2 used significant electricity to run, it pales in comparison to the present, with an exponential increase in the use of computers, networks and data centres that is projected to use half of all global electricity by the year 2030.39
Much could be said about the way in which computerisation changed social and natural life on our planet, but a key point here is the multiplication of uses for supercomputing: supercharging the production of more objects, surveilling and mapping the way in which we live, charting the systems dynamics of such natural patterns as climate and making the weapons of war more efficient. These are all elements of the Anthropocene, modern in technique and postmodern in relativising the certainties it set out to measure. Across all possible uses, computing machines gain power from the intensity of the automated processes that they enable, their use bound up with increasingly abstracted ways of being and disembodied ways of doing.40
Furthermore, as the Cray-2 exemplifies, the materiality of this world has in itself various shades of toxic energy intensity.41 Contradictorily, computing machines allow us to monitor our negative impact on the world, such as through climate change projections, and to intensify damage to the world that we are watching – indeed, the very act of fabricating and using these resource- and waste-intensive technologies is itself bound up with Anthropogenic transformations. As for the future, a journalist at Techcrunch reports with careful emotional understatement that little has changed:
Cray has been commissioned by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a supercomputer [for deployment in 2023] head and shoulders above all the rest, with the contract valued at some $600 million. Disappointingly, El Capitan, as the system will be called, will be more or less solely dedicated to redesigning our nuclear armament.42
The sombre emotion of disappointment is not an emotion that one would associate with supercomputers, but there it is. It is predictably ‘disappointing’ that objects like this will continue to contribute to the unsettling of human conditions and the web of life in which we are embedded.
To conclude, we turn to a created object that politicises the act of being human in all its contradictions, including computerised climate-watching and war-making. It indirectly suggests a history of human hubris while illustrating an apparently antithetical propensity, human frailty – feelings of awe in the face of the cosmological whole and the coming End Time. This object’s name speaks of cross-temporal complexity and emotions beyond gentle disappointment.
3.4.2 Atomic Apocalypse
In ‘Atomic Apocalypse’, a large mixed-medium sculpture, Death, personified as a titanic skeleton, uses the entire Earth as a grim throne.43 A life-sized global Pale Horse moves on an orbit circling human extinction. The papier-mâché figure of Death, soul-reaping scythe in one hand and nuclear weapon in the other, is captured bellowing an absurd, evil cackle before the carnival of universal ruin.
This simultaneously comical and terrifying scene was created in Mexico in the 1980s by the Linares family (more specific authorship is not specified by the Museum, and this is probably due as much to a traditional aversion to individualising authorship as it was to a lax modern collecting process). The object draws on the imaginary of the Day of the Dead festival, a complex cultural reflection on death and the human condition that has been celebrated for around 3000 years. Today the festival has many syncretic layers of meaning, from traditional Aztec and Christian cosmologies to elements of postmodern political satire. While seriously engaging traditional imagery, the creators simultaneously depict a scene of modern/postmodern horrors. Death is at once one of the traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, riders ushering in the Great Tribulation at the End Times, and the harbinger of modern nuclear weapons. Death is joined by War, riding a blood-red horse, unsheathed sword in hand, and girded by references to the mutual assured destruction (MAD) doctrine of Cold War nuclear tensions. They are flanked by the black horseman, Famine, riding a giant locust, with repellent references to the famines in Biafra, Bangladesh and Ethiopia; and the white rider, Pestilence, sitting atop a grotesque vulture – with reference to the HIV/AIDS outbreak. These four agents of apocalypse loom over a scene of carnivalesque horror that caricatures and mocks the absurdity of our historical moment. It carries forward past imaginaries into the world of the Great Unsettling.
While many cultures have long imagined the End Times in one way or another, only the techno-scientific cultures that emerged during the Second World War – the ones that split the atom and pressed onwards with increasingly generalised ecological catastrophe – have been capable of bringing about a global material apocalypse of our own creation. This is the darkest shadow of the Anthropocene, one of extinction and extermination on a world scale. It is the looming spectre of a global holocaust in the etymological sense of the term, the ‘whole burnt’. The object helps to render this both a reality and preposterous, an extravagant and grotesque impasse which, while real and ominous, is riddled with contradictions. It reveals powerlessness in the heart of human power. This is a historic parable of human hubris worthy of any End Times myth.
4 Conclusion
We invest enormous emotional energy in human-created objects. They are variously the subject of joy and sadness, wonder and distain, animation and disinterest. More than that, they represent the human condition in its myriad dimensions. In mapping the emotional life of objects, we are in effect tracing our own human histories, the multiple criss-crossing lines of human engagement with others and with nature.
This essay describes how this mapping can be approached without, on the one hand, reducing these histories to wondrous self-confirming stories – in flawed contemporary theoretical parlance, to open assemblages of twisting rhizomic possibility. Wonder is important, but is only part of the narratives presented here. Wondering about the cultural and political meaning of wonder is also important. At the same time, this essay elaborates how it is possible methodologically to place the creation of objects in historical phases without, on the other hand, reducing those phases to epochs fixed by their dominant ways of life or reducing objects to expressions of their age. In other words, change, continuity, contingency, emergence and the dominant structures of social life all play a part in telling stories about objects. By this argument, putting objects in historical context is not enough.
By using a thought experiment to complicate the more usual approaches to collecting contextual stories and networked connections concerning objects – that is, by noting the institutional placement, historical appropriation and ontological framing of the chosen objects, and by asking how those objects illustrate an aspect of the Anthropocene, this essay seeks to test this engaged theory of objects. A number of contentions are associated with this approach. Objects are central to the human narration of social relations and emotional life. Objects as social things exist in multiple (that is, ontologically different) time frames, sometimes at the same time. Objects mediate our (human) relation to the larger social and natural world, even as they are part of that world. Objects, as carriers of meaning, move across different ontological orientations. It is the last of these contentions, we argue, that is the most neglected. Without understanding the crosscutting, constitutive and ontological variable framing of how humans variously give meaning to objects, the world is reduced to flat (even if sometimes wondrous) tales that presume ‘our’ dominance at the beginning and end of history.
Acknowledgements
This essay is based on a project called ‘Objects of the Anthropocene,’ which we have been developing with the British Museum in London (with Stuart Frost) and the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin (with Justine Czerniak). However, because COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted all our immediate plans for the project, we have limited ourselves in this essay to working through some of the theoretical background to the method. We thank Stuart and Justine for their generous collaboration, which has made this essay possible.
Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,’ in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–92. When Kopytoff suggests, for example, that commodities as social objects are ‘a universal cultural phenomenon’ (68), he flattens the ontological difference between gift exchange and commodity exchange as cultural systems. For an extended critique of this position see Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (London: Sage Publications, 2006), ch. 5.
Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
Regularly surfacing in archaeology are debates about the emotional resonance of objects that were created before cultures of writing gave us as ‘readers’ partial access to past emotional narratives concerning objects. See Archaeological Dialogues 17, no. 2 (2010). Our argument is that without the narration of affect we cannot presume the content of emotional fields. We can only seek to understand the breadth and possible intensity of attention.
This is to completely reject the universalising arguments of writers such as Paul Ekman: see Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communications and Emotional Life (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2007).
Elaborated in James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism.
There is not the space here to do more than outline the different formations. For a deeper elaboration see Paul James, ‘What Does It Mean Ontologically to Be Religious?’ Arena Journal 49/50 (2018): 56–100; also, James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism.
Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Remote Possibilities: Hoa Hakananai’a and HMS Topaz on Rapa Nui (London: British Museum, 2006).
From Neil MacGregor, History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Penguin, 2010), to Roger Moorhouse, Hitler’s Third Reich in 100 Objects: A Material History of Nazi Germany (Newport, NSW, Australia: Big Sky Publishing, 2021).
See www.circlesofemotion.org for an explanation and illustration of how the method works.
Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness (New York: Springer, 1962).
James A. Russell, ‘Affect Space is Bipolar,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 3 (1979): 345–56.
This is contested by some psychologists who suggest that rather than being simultaneously held, these mixed emotions are in a ‘rotating sequence.’ For a popularised expression of this contestation see Leon F. Seltzer, ‘Can You Feel Two Emotions at Once? Indecision, Vacillation, Procrastination: They’re All Driven by Bipolar Emotions,’ Psychology Today, 11 June 2014, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201406/can-you-feel-two -emotions-once. However, despite the scientific certainty of this argument, it turns firstly on a modern convention that bitter-sweet is not a single emotion, and secondly that the concept of ‘held’ means held in conscious attention.
Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1661–65] 1985), 504.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso 2005). This work was developed in Manfred B. Steger and Paul James, Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
This category comes from David Northrup’s radical, yet simple, temporal model of global history in ‘Globalization and the Great Convergence: Rethinking World History in the Long Term,’ Journal of World History 16, no. 3 (2005) 249–67.
Anonymous, Handaxe, phonolite, lower Palaeolithic, British Museum, 1934,1214.49, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1934-1214-49.
Neil MacGregor, History of the World in 100 Objects (New York: Penguin, 2010), ch. 3.
L. S. B. Leakey, Olduvai Gorge: A Report on the Evolution of the Handaxe Culture in Beds I–IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951).
Mumford argues against the economically centred interpretations of human origins, writing provocatively: ‘If the only clues to Shakespeare’s achievement as a dramatist were his cradle, an Elizabethan mug, his lower jaw and a few rotten planks from the Globe Theatre, one could not even dimly imagine the subject matter of his plays, still less guess in one’s wildest moments what a poet he was’. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967), 23.
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), 159–63.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-3375. Museum number K.3375, excavated in northern Iraq.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 39–47.
David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Holt, 2006).
Mumford, Technics and Human Development, 163–87.
Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2017), 27–29.
‘The Invention of Movable Metal Type: Goryeo Technology and Wisdom,’ Cheongju Early Printing Museum, 2019, https://jikjiworld.cheongju.go.kr/app3/jikjiworld/content/eng_main/index.html.
M. Sophia Newman, ‘The Buddhist History of Movable Type,’ Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (Winter, 2016), https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhist-history-moveable-type/.
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992). The term ‘Capitalocene’ has most strongly been associated with Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra (London: Verso, 2000); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).
Rebecca Mead, ‘Where Did That Cockatoo Come From?,’ The New Yorker, 5 July 2021; Heather Dalton, ‘A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo in Fifteenth-Century Mantua: Rethinking Symbols of Sanctity and Patterns of Trade,’ Renaissance Studies 28, no. 5 (2014), 676–94.
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London, NG725, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-wright-of-derby-an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-the-air-pump; Valentine Green, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1769, mezzotint on paper, British Museum, 1867-1012-600, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1867-1012-600.
Jonathan Jones, ‘Cruel Science: Joseph Wright of Derby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump,”’ The Guardian, 11 September 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/picture/2012/sep/11/joseph-wright-experiment-bird-air-pump.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).
Linda Johnson, ‘Animal Experimentation in 18th-Century Art: Joseph Wright of Derby,’ Journal of Animal Ethics 6, no. 2 (2016): 164–76.
Here two key theorists provide inspiration to our approach without our method aligning with their base-superstructure orthodoxies: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
‘Vintage Computer Chip Collectibles, Memorabilia & Jewelry,’ Chips etc., n.d., www.chip setc.com/cray-research.html. Fittingly, this is a website for collectible objects.
Anders S. G. Andrae and Thomas Edler, ‘On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030,’ Challenges 6, no. 1 (2015): 117–57.
Timothy Erik Ström, Globalization and Surveillance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Devin Coldewey, ‘$600M Cray Supercomputer Will Tower above the Rest – to Build Better Nukes,’ Techcrunch, 14 August 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/13/600m-cray-supercomputer-will-tower-above-the-rest-to-build-better-nukes/.
British Museum, Registration number: Am1989,13.13, acquired 1989. The creator is listed as the ‘Workshop of Linares’ in Mexico City.
